


Oracle-Eyed and Questioning

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Canonical Female Crowley, F/M, Gen, Golgotha, The Girl with the Beautiful Eyes, be kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 05:30:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20501681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This ties to an image almost everyone has seen once, and having once seen it, recall it for years afterward. It's one of National Geographic's most famous covers. I'm not sure seeing it helps the story or harms it. I'm going to leave it up to you whether to click through, or just read and go on descriptions and memories of your own. But--you can see the cover photo in question here:https://www.ecrater.com/p/23512684/sharbat-gula-girl-national-geographic?gps=1&id=798776763097&gclid=CjwKCAjw-7LrBRB6EiwAhh1yX9tnWzHL4a3TXyUlMYxu69CKEL7j-4DLYCHy13YOQxOl537wUoyhXxoC1IsQAvD_BwEI can't swear, but--this one, to *me*, feels intense. Of course, your intense and mine may not match in the least. But I myself would consider walking into this story a bit carefully. It's not graphic. It is mature, both in terms of ideas and in terms of activities described. Mainly it's a fill-in story extrapolating in-canon events in greater detail, with greater emotional charge.I wrote it because I find it hard to believe that female-Crowley at Golgotha was not at least in part designed by costume and makeup with an idea of the National Geographic photo in their minds, or that Aziraphale would not see--and remember.





	Oracle-Eyed and Questioning

Aziraphale saw the photo in June of 1985. He’d closed up the shop[i] early, posting “personal matters,” as the cause in the shop window. The “personal matters” were anguish over a walk-in who’d proved far too determined to become an actual, money-for-book-exchanging customer, combined with a particularly pleasant day to go out walking. And, of course, general principle: it was always good policy to close up erratically, reducing client faith in the odds of the store being open at any given time.

He headed north up Greek Street toward Soho Square Garden. After circling the little park any number of times, feeling quite comfortably Victorian—secure for a moment from the endless rush of time—he left, puttering a block over to Dean Street, where he popped into Rippon’s news stand, to prowl the news, finding print so much more civilized a way of keeping up, when compared to radio, television, and the newly burgeoning computer networks.

He paced the aisles, peering with the sort of chipper, hands-behind-his-back manners of a righteous Victorian prowling the Crystal Palace or the Victoria and Albert. There was an article about Gorbachev’s recent rise to power. Another on the ongoing American hostage crisis. Quite a few papers were on about the Football Association’s ban on games with European teams. The usual ephemera. So much of human “news” appeared to Aziraphale as the buzzing of bees, here and gone, near meaningless. Forgotten in days, and barely even noted in eternity.

And then he saw her. The girl on the cover of… (he frowned, pondering…) National Geographic.Yes—though he still recalled it as a quaint little journal for adventurers and travelers, with its table of contents printed on its yellow-and-white cover, and no pictures to be seen.

This, though, was a picture—a picture that tore him back in time, roughly 1,952 years.

Golgotha.

No. No—it wasn’t Golgotha, and it wasn’t Crowley staring out from the magazine cover. Out of many millions of images, Aziraphale kept comparatively few pristine and instantly available without much mental rummaging, but Crowley at Golgotha was among those few. He could say with conviction that the girl was not really Crowley. And, yet—

Yes. Her eyes were a tawny hazel gold and green in pale coffee-and-cream skin—but they leapt at you like Crowley’s serpent gold, haunting, filled with potential and intensity. Her face was softer and younger than Crowley’s had ever been—but as perfectly sculpted, with much the same high brow and near-identical hair, though black, not red, tumbling down over her shoulder into a muted burgundy-red veil so like Crowley’s fall-back when black would not do… If they had stood together on the Hill of the Skull, they could have been mother and daughter, sister, aunt, Crowley in the matronly black veil, the girl in the dull red. Both beautiful. Both impossible to forget.

It was a knife in Aziraphale’s gut.

He never forgot the day. No one who had anything to do with Heaven and Hell did, of course. The scriptures said The Christ had risen into heaven and ruled at the right hand of his father. It was taken as truth, though God was more commonly revealed as a mother (Or, as some said, “A right damned mother!”), and no one had seen Jeshua ben Joseph…or any other of the dead. The faithful said, “After the second coming, they will be seen.” But it raised questions one didn’t want to ask too openly.

But much as it raised Aziraphale’s doubts, tweaked his insecurity, raised questions he could not answer, the death of Jesus alone was not the sole reason he remembered Golgotha, in 33 AD.

He could remember her—Crowley, embodied as a woman, striking. Grieving. As crammed with questions as he had ever been. As tinged with guilt. The wind had rushed over the dry land, kicking up little dust devils and fluttering the long masses of Jezebel-red hair that lay, beautiful, across her shoulder and over her breast…a breast like the cast of a perfect apple, fit to fill a man’s hand, tipped with a cinnamon-brown nipple that rose easily at the slightest kiss.

He knew, because they had gone together to a little hostel outside Jerusalem, hours and hours after. After Peter had fled, denying his lord. After the Marys had taken the body away to the cavern donated by a kind and brave patron. After angel and demon had stood together, announcing the empty cave and the risen Christ—a matter they, too, had to take on faith, because it happened outside their own Celestial vision just as outside human vision. And, yet—the stone was rolled away. The tomb was empty. The grave wrappings left behind. The women had rushed out, Magdalene the first Evangelist shouting out the Good News.

And Crowley and Aziraphale had gone together to the Inn of the Rich Camel, near the Eye of the Needle, and drunk themselves sick, and sobered themselves again, and drunk some more, and at last staggered up the stairs to the second floor, and up the ladder to the curtained private place on the roof, under cold stars. And somehow, in all that, they had…fraternized. No—fraternization suggested brotherly chastity. They had consorted, one with the other. That was both nice and accurate.

Consorted.

She had been so beautiful, in her tragic confusion. So much his bride, matching his own grief and doubts. Her hands had shaken as she’d drawn the turban from his head, played hungrily with his pale curls. And those eyes.

God in heaven, Lady-Lord of Hosts. Those eyes. Those beautiful eyes, shocked and lost and lonely and sad. The hair, the same red as the veil of the girl on the magazine cover, red on black linen—then red pouring over pale, near-white skin. She had looked at Aziraphale in tenderness and pain, and whispered hoarsely, “’Be kind to one another.’” And before she could ask if the same sordid ending was slated for all who followed Jesus to death, Aziraphale pulled her close, and did everything he could think of to be kind to the sad demon. His demon.

He kissed her tattoo, tracing it with his tongue as he stroked her flank, her hip, trailed his fingers down to her crotch, slipped between the hot, wet folds of her flesh, caressed her with kindness, with love, with need, with sorrow. Cradled her as she moaned, desire mixing with mourning.

He cried his own tears into her hair. Shivered as her hand found his rod. Begged for her mercy as she raised his need higher and higher. Obeyed her request to take her. Drew her up over him, drove up into her body as her body rode down over his.

They came—not in simple, uniform togetherness, but in shaken, staggered series. Him. Her. Her again. A miraculous, needy him. A wait. Her. Him again.

Then they coiled together. Even Aziraphale slept, desperate for the escape. When he woke the woman was gone, replaced with the serpent, sleek and elegant, curled around his arm, his chest, his hips, head resting on his belly.

He stroked the black scales. He noted that the serpent had already sent his clothes away. With a wry smile he offered to carry his reptilian companion out of Jerusalem, hidden in his robes.

The serpent silently accepted the offer, coiling firmly around Aziraphale’s waist, hugging tighter than any belt or girdle or sash. When they had passed out of the town and up into the hills, where the wild maquis grew all spiky and sere, ever-ready to catch fire and burn, Aziraphale stopped under an olive tree. He sat, and took out a bottle of clear water. The snake slid out of his robes. She took form again, as beautiful as the days before.

Those eyes. That hair, lying bold across her shoulder.

She was naked as dawn itself. As precious and beautiful as the morning star (no pun intended…). Her wings were jet black—not by curse, but by choice, Crowley had told him once. The wind rustled her flight feathers, stirred her tresses.

“You were Lilith, once, weren’t you?” Aziraphale said, knowing the answer already.

She gave a wicked, cheeky smile and shrugged. “What’s in a name, angel? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Years later, hearing it in Juliet’s mouth, in Shakespeare’s Globe, Aziraphale had sworn, caught between amusement and affront. That demon! Filling Shakespeare’s plays with his own elegant words…

But even then, he’d remembered Golgotha, and the beauty of the woman who’d held his hand under cover of their robes, as Jesus died and begged that the whole world be forgiven on grounds of pure, dull-witted ignorance. Who’d stood in the garden and still never seen the miracle occur. Who’d been…kind.

That final day, in the hills above Jerusalem, she’d spread her wings and taken flight, her shadow passing in great circles as she caught the updraft and rose, higher and higher, wider and wider (turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer…Things come apart. The center cannot hold…)(the first time he read that poem, he’d had to close the shop for an entire month, memories of the black buzzard rising into blue-white infinity, leaving him there, under the olive tree, with no comfort left but a bottle of well-water and a chunk of dry cheese…)

Those eyes. Those amazing, beautiful eyes.

He glanced at the price on the cover, because that’s what one did as a human, and performed minor stage magic to fumble coins out of his pocket—because it was more fun than appearing the same coins with a miracle. He paid for the magazine, let the shop keeper pack it into a paper bag, and tucked the whole under his elbow before proceeding home.

He could not bring himself to cut the cover off. Instead he framed the magazine whole and tucked it in the upstairs room where he retreated to read, to cry, to nap occasionally. She stared out at him.

She was not Crowley. No one and nothing could ever be Crowley. And, yet, every time he saw those amazing eyes, he was back on the hill above Jerusalem, watching his demon fly away, remembering her arms in the night after Golgotha and its aftermath, and those eyes. Those amazing, beautiful eyes…

[i] I am nothing if not obsessive in my world building. I hereby proclaim Aziraphale’s shop to be on the corner of Greek Street and Old Compton, at 23 Greek Street. The Our World version until recently housed a Chinese restaurant called Bun House, specializing in steamed buns. It looks quite yummy. My theory is that in Aziraphale’s universe both exist simultaneously, adding a whole additional layer of confusion to his customers in a way that allows Aziraphale to feel not-entirely-bastardly: after all, they may not get their paws on his books, but they do get lovely siu bao and tea and tasty little sides like sesame-steamed greens. And, conversely, whenever he feels a little peckish he can ease between the lines of probability and get some siu bao himself. The corner placement looks plausibly similar in alignment and street placing to match the series, even if the actual storefronts are different. And Soho Square Gardens are just up the street, convenient on a day when an angel might feel like toddling quietly around in circles among the greenery. Another, more or less equal option is a block down Greek Street, on Romily and Greek, where there is a Chinese restaurant called Bar Shu, again with a similar corner-exit shop front that looks enough like the vision conjured for Good Omens the Series to be plausible. Again offering Aziraphale access to the park, access to good Chinese food and tea, and to sooth his conscience when he diverts clients to the restaurant.


End file.
